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Haiti's homeless plead for tents after earthquake

The dusty soccer field lined with
spacious tents is an oasis for earthquake survivors among Haiti's
homeless sheltering by the hundreds of thousands in squalid camps.

Competition for the canvas homes has boiled into arguments and
machete fights, a sign of the desperation felt by the hundreds of
thousands of people without homes struggling for shelter in this
wrecked city. Haiti's president has asked the world for 200,000
tents and says he will sleep in one himself.

Fenela Jacobs, 39, lives in a 13-by-13-foot abode
provided by the Britain-based Islamic Relief Worldwide. She says
the group offered her two tents for 21 survivors, but she ended up
putting everyone in one tent after people threatened to burn both
down if she didn't give a tent up.

Still, she says living in the 6-foot-high khaki
home with a paisley interior is better than the makeshift shelters
crafted from bed sheets propped on wooden sticks where her family
was living before.

"It's a lot more comfortable," Jacobs said, though she added
it gets really hot inside the tent in Cazo, a Port-au-Prince
neighborhood hidden in the hills behind the international airport.

Tents are in desperately short supply following the
7.0-magnitude quake on Jan. 12 that killed at least 150,000 people.

The global agency supplying tents said it already had 10,000
stored in Haiti and at least 30,000 more would be arriving. But
that "is unlikely to address the extensive shelter needs," the
International Organization for Migration stressed.

Port-au-PrinceAP Photo/Gregory Bull

The organization had estimated 100,000 family-sized tents were
needed. But the U.N. says up to 1 million people require shelter,
and President Rene Preval issued an urgent appeal Monday calling
for 200,000 tents and urging that the aircraft carrying them be
given urgent landing priority at Port-au-Prince airport.

In solidarity with earthquake victims, Preval plans to move into
a tent home on the manicured lawn of his collapsed National Palace
in downtown Port-au-Prince, Tourism Minister Patrick Delatour told
The Associated Press.

"It is a decision that the president has made himself," Delatour said.

The secretary-general of the Organization of American States,
Jose Miguel Insulza, planned to visit Haiti on Tuesday to study
relief efforts.

The Haitian government and international groups were preparing a
more substantial tent city on Port-au-Prince's outskirts.

The Haitian government asked the international community to
provide $3 billion for Haiti's reconstruction.

Brazilian army engineers with the U.N. peacekeeping force in
Haiti have cleared and leveled 12 acres north of
the city, planned as the first of more than a half-dozen sites that
officials hope will shelter the displaced before the onset of
spring rains and summer hurricanes.

Col. Delcio Monteiro Sapper said the Interamerican Development
Bank wants to clear a total of 247 acres owned by
Haiti's government that could house 100,000 quake refugees.

Helen Clark, administrator of the U.N. Development Program, said
providing shelter is a pressing priority that requires innovative
solutions.

"China, for example, set up 400,000 semi-permanent houses after
the Sichuan earthquake," she said in a statement. "Similar
initiatives will need to be considered and supported for Haiti."

On the soccer field in the Cazo neighborhood, the tents are
marked "Qatar Aid," a gift from the Gulf state, but some Haitian
quake survivors have personalized theirs - one flies a Haitian
flag, another has a Jamaican flag with a picture of Bob Marley.

"This was miserable," said Islamic Relief Worldwide's Moustafa
Osman, from Birmingham, England, pointing to the few remaining
homemade shelters at the site. "People were living like this
everywhere."

Osman's own supply of 1,000 tents has yet to make its way to
Haiti, stuck somewhere en route, or possibly even waiting in
containers that have arrived at Port-au-Prince airport but have yet
to be unpacked.

He persuaded a Qatari search and rescue team that was leaving
Haiti to donate their 82 tents. He desperately needs at least 16
more for the soccer field settlement, which houses 500 people.
Latrines and showers are also yet to arrive.

Osman doesn't speak the local Creole language, so he went to a
mosque and hired two Haitians to translate for him. He said he made
clear to them that "we are not here for the Muslims, we are here
for all the people."

He then negotiated with the St. Claire Roman Catholic Church for
permission to use the field on their land for his camp and cleared
it with Haiti's government. Fights broke out Sunday when workers
were distributing tents, with families trying to get the shelters
and others competing for space.

Osman confiscated a machete and temporarily evacuated his staff
from the camp.

He worries there will be violence if he doesn't get the tents
needed to house the remaining families. He hired two men among the
refugees, clad them in blue vests marked Islamic Relief Worldwide
and put them to work as go-betweens linking the people in the camp
and his staff.

In Montreal on Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton and officials of more than two dozen donor nations and
international organizations met to assess the progress of the
relief effort.

The Haitian government asked the international community to
provide $3 billion for Haiti's reconstruction, the tourism minister
said. Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told the conference his
impoverished nation lost 60 percent of its gross domestic product
in the quake.

U.S. officials say the rescue phase of the operation is over and
the focus has shifted to relief and recovery.

"Outside of the food area, the two prime worries are: one,
medical services or medical equipment, and, two, shelter," said
Lewis Lucke, U.S. special coordinator for relief and
reconstruction.

He said officials are seeing so many people unable to return to
their homes that they are scrambling to get them plastic sheeting
and other shelter. "This is one of our main priorities."

The U.N. reported Tuesday that more police officers were
reporting for duty and Port-au-Prince was generally secure but
there had been isolated looting. It said commerce was increasing,
with banks, supermarkets and gas stations returning to operation.

The U.S. government is donating its old and unused embassy
building in downtown Port-au-Prince to Haiti's government, which
will use it as a temporary legislature, according to Delatour, the
tourism minister.

The building, next door to the partially collapsed Parliament
building, will be rented at a nominal $1 a year, Delatour said. One
senator was killed in the collapse and another was trapped for
days, but rescued.

There are 54 confirmed American dead in Haiti, and U.S.
officials were seeking to confirm 36 other possible deaths, State
Department spokesman Gordon Duguid said Monday.